The Burglar

A showy medium has a set of fancy jewels. Dan Duryea, THE BURGLAR, intends to steal them with the help of gang member Jayne Mansfield. Will the stresses and strains of the criminal lifestyle wreck their lives, or will the gang finally make the big score that will let them all retire?

This is one of those movies, following in the wake of the Asphalt Jungle, that shows how the tiny character flaws of the criminals involved in a caper all work to mess up their enterprise. If you like the genre, you'll like this. If you are not a noir/crime movie enthusiast, you might determine that all this seems pretty derivative from better movies. The director has definitely seen his Orson Welles movies (Citizen Kane and Lady from Shanghai are sampled here), but he only has a B-movie plot to drive the action. Later in the movie, this becomes a problem when the mechanics of inevitable doom require Duryea to show an implausible lack of judgment.

Nevertheless, Dan Duryea, who plays his role without an ounce of his usual scuzzy smarm, responds quite well to being cast somewhat against type. Jayne Mansfield, who had not yet developed her inflatable sex doll persona (this movie was shot well before Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), does well with a fairly nuanced part that makes use of her looks, but does not require her to be either stupid or sleazy. The movie, when not being overly showy with its visuals, gets in some great location shooting in both Philadlphia and Atlantic City.

This is worth seeing, if you like crime movies. But you will get the feeling there was a lot of potential that went unfulfilled here.

For a chance to look at Atlantic City in the Fifties before the casinos moved in The Burglar is the film for you. Dan Duryea stars in this small B film from Columbia as a professional burglar looking to make a big score with a necklace robbed from a fake spiritualist.

Duryea's team consists of Peter Capell jewelry expert, Mickey Shaughnessy muscle and hormones, and Jayne Mansfield who gives his hormones their exercise. Jayne's kind of a legacy for Duryea, if you can believe he thinks of her as kind of a kid sister. Duryea was raised by Jayne's father who was also a burglar and taught him the trade.

The robbery goes, but Duryea is spotted by cop Stewart Bradley who's on the take. So he has real police as well as this crooked one looking to get in on the score.

You'll note the similarities between The Burglar and The Asphalt Jungle. Both Duryea here and Sterling Hayden in the John Huston classic seem to be drawn inexorably to disaster. The difference is that Huston had that MGM shine to his film and this is a routine B film that's a cut above average.

Usually when a film is held up for a couple of years for release that spells problems. But The Burglar shot in 1955 and released in 1957 is moody and atmospheric and a nifty noir feature. Jayne Mansfield gets some competition in the sex pot department from Martha Vickers best remembered as Lauren Bacall's psychotic sister in The Big Sleep. She's working with Bradley who's working on Mansfield. All I can say is nice work if you can get it.

Around this time there was an attempt to make a lead of Dan Duryea, but he never really transitioned into that category. But The Burglar represents a fine bit of work from him and the rest of the cast.

Let's break this film into 3 scenes: the intro and robbery – good. The ending – good. The wordy bit in the middle – awful.

There is a reasonable (not brilliant) story in there and the cast make a good fist of that but the overly emotional scenes which bind the story together just don't work. That the score is overpowering doesn't help.

But this film could have been so much better if it was tightened up. There are some decent jazz rhythms humming away in the background which could have been worked on and the dramatisation I refer to in the middle could also have been better arranged.

On the plus side, the seedy setting suits the film and I appreciate the straightforward action – no need for choreographed martial arts when a few decent punches (carefully played in the background) do the job.

I wouldn't go out of my way to watch this film again but...if you have 90 minutes to kill it is worth persevering with.

All the characters seem believable, if occasionally overwrought, and Mansfield seems refreshingly like a human being. Many interesting edits keep up the pacing, and the angles are rarely less than exceptional. Easy to see why Marty Scorsese likes this one, and so do we.

This is one of those extravagantly stylized late-period noirs, one which palpitates with flamboyant cinematic technique. It belongs in the same club as those other exaggerated, self-consciously arty noirs of the late 50s/early 60s, like Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly, Blast of Silence and Sam Fuller's contemporaneous contributions to the genre. Wendkos directs like a recent A+ film school graduate showing off every Hitchcock and Welles trick he's learned -- there are many stunning edits (he is also credited as the film's editor), several strikingly composed shots, and a suitably seedy background (the fact that the crooks' hideout is right next to a railway line full of speeding streamliners is a boon). At the same time, he toes the studio line of narrative clarity and cohesive action scenes enough to make this suitable viewing for the non-buff (one can see why he spent most of his years in television, but at the same time could dazzle with over-the-top effects in The Mephisto Waltz.) Fans of Atlantic City's Steel Pier are in for a treat in the film's climax (which owes a bit too much to The Lady from Shanghai) -- we even get to see the diving horse. But notably, we also see the soggy marshes that border the city and reflect the protagonists' own situational quagmire. It may not have the integrity of the more subtly devastating noirs of the Siodmak 40s, but it has its own postmodern tradition to uphold. It's worth picking this one up even on the third-generation dupes that are now in circulation; a wide-screen dvd restoration is definitely in order.